Is loss of meter in poetry "decay"?

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Frank Antonson

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This may be just a little premature, but I am going to have my students undertake to write a long, narrative poem in verse.

I suspect that metered poetry is as effective now as it ever was, so WHY there has been such a move away from it over the last 150 years -- say, since Tennyson?

Incidentally, I do not consider "free verse" to be verse at all.
 

Frank Antonson

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I am really hoping for some discussion about this, so let me see if I can further "prime the pump".
It has occurred to me that a development in language which might be the inverse of the decline of meter in "poetry" is the rise of literacy and of the printing industry. Novels are not really meant to be read aloud, and the skill involved in reading and understanding them is quite different from that involved in hearing and understanding oral recitation of verse.
I am a slow reader; and, therefore, what I read HAS to be rich to be pleasurable. When I think about the populations that I know of where verse is still prized, I find that they tend to be either the illiterate or the non-academic e.g. rappers and farm folk.
Shakespeare's audience was largely illiterate. The people in it may well have had a MUCH more acute ear for the beauty of verse.
 

MrPedantic

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As a preliminary, it might be necessary to establish the meaning of "metre", in the proposed discussion.

For example, English verse between 1500 and 1900 is predominantly accentual, i.e. its various metres imply certain patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables.

On the other hand, Virgil and Euripides might well have found accentual verse slightly crude, as they were accustomed to verse measured by quantity, i.e. by the length of syllables. (Then too, while English verse has made much use of rhyme, rhyme was generally avoided in Greek and Latin poetry.)

Again, in the prosody of the Romance languages, e.g. the French alexandrine, metre is defined in terms of the number of syllables, and its effects are likely to be lost on an audience accustomed to English accentual iambics.

Best wishes,

MrP
 

Frank Antonson

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Thank you so much for responding.

I am referring to metre as the use of stressed and unstressed syllables, as in iambic pentameter, anapestic tetrameter, etc.

One of the things that really got me thinking about this was the effect it had upon one of my unruly classes when I read aloud the first 44 stanzas of the poem that my students have written so far. I did this while they could see it projected on a screen. I read instead of them because I knew that they would stumble and not keep the beat. In any case, it blew them away. Some of them said that they were going to show that to their parents because it was so good (It is on line.) I am not so sure that it is that good, but they were captivated. I can't imagine that prose would have done that -- not to THEM.

If you would like to see it, it is at <somd.webs.com>.
 

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I am not sure if this is relevant, but one of my favourite poems as a child was Longfellow's 'Song of Hiawatha'.

I still remember the opening lines of the (shortened) version that my mother used to read to me. I realised, years later, that I understood very little of it. What I enjoyed was the heavy TUM-ti TUM-ti stresses that my mother gave to her reading.

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By
the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
 
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Raymott

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I'll make a tentative contribution, without asserting that this is the reason.

The tumult of the Great War 1914-1918, and associated social crises, had a huge effect on the arts in Europe.
Formalism and naturalism gave way to more abstract forms. This was already occurring in the visual arts, with impressionism breaking from realism, then leading to expressionism, and totally abstract art. A new aesthetic was necessary in an age that was socially disordered, where formal structures could no longer be trusted.
The formality of Victorian/Edwardian literature gave way to modernism. Poets such as Esra Pound and T.S.Eliot wrote bizarre (for the time) verses. In prose, Woolf and others wrote 'stream of consciousness' literature, that sought to portray the anarchic subconscious, rather than the superficial, ordered facade of reality.
This led into the Jazz Age of the 20s, where music and morals became syncopated away from the reliance on strict metrical standards, and freedom has become dominant over order in Western art as a value pretty much ever since. You could call that decadence, or decay, or something else.

At least, that's my opinion this evening.
 

Frank Antonson

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Thank you (you'uns) SO much for your responses. They have already been very useful to me.

In order, let me think. My definition of verse is "language that can be spoken to a beat" (not necessarily sung). (With singing other factors enter in -- like melismas, almost completely absent from the kind of English folk songs that Cecil Sharpe collected). The fact that some languages use length of syllable rather than stress should not change the verse's being able to be spoken to a beat. I think that 1500 is way too late to say that verse began to very present in English. What about Chaucer's iambic pentameter, troubador songs, the ballads of Robin Hood, or the alliterative verse of "Beowulf". (Rhyme, of course, is a different subject).

The explanation of the developments in the visual arts and music may well be very pertinent. I had thought about that, but hesitated to include it at first in this discussion.

Thanks for reminding me of Longfellow's "Hiawatha" (I might have forgotten to include it or an allusion to it and some use of the the trochaic tetrameter therein in my students' narrative poem) . (Had I mentioned that I already intended to use some of the dactylic hexameter of Lonffellow's "Evangeline"?) And THAT reminded me of the vast popularity of Kipling's verse and of the fact that Tolkien included a lot of verse within his works.

I GREATLY appreciate your (you'unses) input!!

Frank
 

birdeen's call

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birdeen's call

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Again, in the prosody of the Romance languages, e.g. the French alexandrine, metre is defined in terms of the number of syllables, and its effects are likely to be lost on an audience accustomed to English accentual iambics.
Older Polish poetry is largely syllabic (our national epic, Sir Thaddeus, is a rhymed tridecasyllable), where the rhythm is given by the use of caesuras. Iambic pentameter does not exist in Polish which makes my reading of English poetry difficult---it does not seem rhytmical to me.
 

Frank Antonson

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Dear Birdeen's Call,

I looked at those links that you sent. I cannot say that I read them closely, but I found that there was very little there that I would include within the category of wonderful verse. Maybe I should limit the description of my interest to NARRATIVE verse.

More "lyrical" poetry could probably do without the steady beat of verse -- and, judging from some of those examples, might do well to do so.

I am glad to know about your national epic. I had never heard of it, and now I may try to find a way to allude to it in my students' work. Does a good translation exist in English?

Oh, also, I was lucky enough to find out about a film the script of which was written in iambic pentameter. The film is called "Yes". I found it far from wonderful and have a few reasons to explain why that was the case.

Frank
 

MrPedantic

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WHY there has been such a move away from it over the last 150 years

I wouldn't agree that metre only relates to accent: that would be to misrepresent Greek, Latin, and French prosody, for instance. An alexandrine of Baudelaire's is not to be read with a beefy British beat; and Clough's hexameters are fairly remote from Homer's tonal arrangements. (While among the English poets, for instance, Milton's rhythms seldom coincide with the underlying iambic pentameter.)

That said, it seems to me that accentual verse has maintained itself quite robustly in the last 100 years. Here is a possible breakdown of the more significant British and American poets for that period:

1. Mostly accentual
Hardy, E. Thomas, Yeats, J.C. Ransom, W. Stevens, Larkin, Graves, Housman, Kipling, Frost, Empson

2. Sometimes accentual, sometimes not
T.S. Eliot, Lowell, Auden, Tate, H. Crane, G. Hill, Heaney

3. Mostly non-accentual
Pound, W.C. Williams, Berryman, M. Moore, Cummings, Lawrence, Roethke, Ginsberg

That doesn't look like a rout to me.

Best wishes,

MrP
 

MrPedantic

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I think that 1500 is way too late to say that verse began to very present in English. What about Chaucer's iambic pentameter, troubador songs, the ballads of Robin Hood, or the alliterative verse of "Beowulf".

It isn't entirely clear that Chaucer's (or even Wyatt's) pentameters were regularly accentual; while the older ballads and alliterative poems were irregular in their patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables.

By the middle of the 16th century, on the other hand, with the pentameters of Sackville, Norton, Howard, etc., and then the earlier Elizabethan lyricists, we find attention both to accent itself and to patterns of stress - to the extent that Sidney can say, in his Apologie, that English poets "observe the accent very precisely; which other languages, eyther cannot doe, or will not doe so absolutely".

On the other hand, he also said that "it is not riming and versing that maketh a Poet, no more then a long gowne maketh an Advocate".

All the best,

MrP
 

Frank Antonson

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Well, I am outclassed in this discussion -- which is quite a comfortable position to be in since I am learning so much.

Some thoughts, though.... I hesitate to even float this one, but I did not realize that Thomas Hardy, a favorite novelist of mine, wrote any verse at all.

A second thought... From memory, I come up with:

"When Robin Hood was twenty years old,
He happened to meet little John,
A jolly brisk blade,
Right fit for the trade,
For he was a lusty young man."

Has my version been adapted??? How is it not accentual?
 

Frank Antonson

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Another example of verse which I intend to allude to (or even use) in my students' poem is the -/---/---/---/-- of Gilbert and Sullivan's "And so in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral/ I am the very model of a modern major general"
 

birdeen's call

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I am glad to know about your national epic. I had never heard of it, and now I may try to find a way to allude to it in my students' work. Does a good translation exist in English?
There's more than one translation but I have read none of them. They're not in tridecasyllable anyway. :) (The poem will be a difficult read for a non-Pole. Without knowing some basics of Polish history and culture, they will find it incomprehensible and, as a result, boring.)

But you have a poem in your own tradition in which metre is less important than other devices, namely Beowulf.
 

Frank Antonson

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Well, "Beowulf" I consider to be extremely metric. The beat is not established by stressed and unstressed syllable, but rather by alliterated syllables. Nonetheless, the beat is there -- four beats per line.
 

Frank Antonson

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I see that there is a film version of "Sir Thaddeus" I think I will check it out.
 

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Well, "Beowulf" I consider to be extremely metric. The beat is not established by stressed and unstressed syllable, but rather by alliterated syllables. Nonetheless, the beat is there -- four beats per line.
That just proves how little I know about prosody--I had no idea that was also metre!
 

Frank Antonson

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Well, maybe I use the word "metre" wrongly. I mean by it the presence of a beat (which I define for my students as "a regular division of time").
 

MrPedantic

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A second thought... From memory, I come up with:

"When Robin Hood was twenty years old,
He happened to meet little John,
A jolly brisk blade,
Right fit for the trade,
For he was a lusty young man."

Has my version been adapted??? How is it not accentual?

Yes, it's accentual (and an 18th century adaptation). But in the older ballads and alliterative poems, though stress is significant, there is no regularity in the number of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Hence my earlier comment about the period 1500 to 1900, where stress and syllabic regularity predominate in English verse.

My main point though was that metre has not been "lost": as listed in my earlier post, there is plenty of 20th century material to occupy readers who prefer regular forms.

Best wishes,

MrP
 
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